Get Email Updates

The Dispatch E-Edition

All current subscribers have full access to Digital D, which includes the E-Edition and
unlimited premium content on Dispatch.com, BuckeyeXtra.com, BlueJacketsXtra.com and
DispatchPolitics.com.
Subscribe
today!

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoManuel Balce Ceneta | Associated PressKit McGinnis, center, offers flowers for her late sister-in-law, Louise Ann Rogers, at the Pan Am 103 memorial cairn in Arlington National Cemetery. A service there yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of a bomb blast on the plane over Lockerbie, Scotland.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Families of some of the 270 people who died in an airliner bombing 25 years ago
gathered for memorial services yesterday in the United States and Britain, honoring victims of a
terrorist attack that killed dozens of American college students and created instant havoc in the
Scottish town where wreckage of the plane rained down.

Bagpipes played and wreaths were laid in the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and mourners gathered
for a moment of silence at London’s Westminster Abbey, while U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told
victims’ relatives at Arlington National Cemetery that they should take comfort in their unity even
if time cannot erase their pain.

“We keep calling for change, and fighting for justice, on behalf of those no longer with us. We
rededicate ourselves — and our nation — to the qualities that defined the men and women we lost,”
Holder said.

The events marked the 25th anniversary of the explosion of Pan Am 103, a New York-bound flight
that exploded over Lockerbie less than an hour after takeoff from London on

Dec. 21, 1988. Many of the victims were American college students flying home for Christmas,
including 35 Syracuse University students participating in a study-abroad program. The attack, a
bomb packed into a suitcase, killed all 259 people aboard the plane and 11 others on the
ground.

The Arlington ceremony took place beside a cairn, or monument, of 270 blocks of red Scottish
sandstone, the nation’s official memorial to the attack.

One speaker, former FBI director Robert Mueller, said he would never forget the sight of the
victims’ personal belongings — a white sneaker, Christmas presents, a Syracuse sweat shirt,
photographs — when he traveled to Lockerbie to investigate the case as a Justice Department
prosecutor.

Whitney Davis lost her sister Shannon, a Syracuse student, and other friends in the explosion.
She said she learned of the attack after returning home from Syracuse, which she also attended.
There was initial hope that survivors would be found and uncertainty that the explosion was an act
of terror.

In Scotland, officials and relatives of victims gathered at Lockerbie’s Dryfesdale Cemetery
yesterday. Syracuse also was holding a public memorial service in a campus chapel.

One man — former Libyan intelligence official Abdel Baset al-Megrahi — was convicted of the
bombing, and a second Libyan suspect was acquitted of all charges. Al-Megrahi was given a life
sentence, but Scottish authorities released him on humanitarian grounds in 2009 when his prostate
cancer was diagnosed. He died in Tripoli last year.